Baron Birtcher spent a number of years as a professional musician, guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He founded an independent record label, and spent 18 years in the commercial real estate business in California. He later turned his hand to writing crime fiction, and his first two hardboiled mystery novels,
Roadhouse Blues and
Ruby Tuesday were
Los Angeles Times and Independent Mystery Booksellers Association bestsellers. He’s also the winner of the Silver Falchion Award (
Hard Latitudes); Winner of Killer Nashville Readers Choice Award (
South California Purples); and Best Book of the Year Award for
Fistful Of Rain. He has also been nominated for the Nero Award, the Lefty, the Foreword Indie, the Claymore, and the Pacific Northwest's Spotted Owl Awards. His new novel,
Knife River, is now available from Open Road.
Knife River is the fourth installment in a series with Sheriff Ty Dawson, a rancher, lawman, military veteran, husband, and father in 1970s Oregon. There are rules in the West no matter what era you were born in, and it’s up to lawman Ty Dawson to make sure they’re followed in the valley he calls home. The people living on this unforgiving land keep to themselves and are wary of the modern world’s encroachment into their quiet lives.
So it’s not without some suspicion that Dawson confronts a newcomer to the region: a record producer who has built a music studio in an isolated compound. His latest project is a collaboration with a famous young rock star named Ian Swann, recording and filming his sessions for a movie. An amphitheater for a live show is being built on the land, giving Dawson flashbacks to the violent Altamont concert. Not on his watch.
But even beefed up security can’t stop a disaster that’s been over a decade in the making. All it takes is one horrific case bleeding its way into the present to prove that the good ol’ days spawned a brand of evil no one wants to revisit...
Birtcher stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the Ty Dawson series
COWBOYS, WRITERS & MUSICIANS and THE ORIGINS OF KNIFE RIVER AND THE TY DAWSON SERIES
By Baron Birtcher
I have long held the belief that you can tell a lot about a cowboy by the way he treats his hat; the way he wears it, and the way he treats it when he takes it off his head. The same can be said about a musician and his instrument, the songwriter and his guitar. We reveal ourselves by the way we treat our favorite objects, and even more so the way we treat our animals, or speak about others in their absence, and the way we treat both friends and strangers in their presence.
I also believe it is the writer’s responsibility to reveal these things—in sum and substance, it is the very core of what we do. If we fail to reach for revelation, for insight, unique perspectives and observations, we are selling ourselves short, and likewise our readers.
In my life, I have had the great joy to participate in all of these pursuits—horseman, musician, and writer—and for me, there is a distinct confluence, a synergy among them that has taught me a great deal about nature, people, and the world.
In recent weeks, I have been doing a number of talks and signings in support of the release of the newest installment of the Sheriff Ty Dawson crime thriller series, Knife River. As has always been the case, my favorite part of those events is the audience Q&A, where readers get to delve deeper into the backstory, the characters, the musical references, and details about the writing process. But the question I encounter most frequently regards the origins of Ty Dawson, and the fictional locale Meriwether County, in which Dawson plies his trade as both a rancher and a sheriff.
In fact, I often characterize the series as Longmire meets Yellowstone in the 1970s.
Frankly, I love that these books are so evocative for many of us, and the fact that they take place during the 1970s conjures such a vast mélange of memories, images and feelings. I had hoped the series would be an immersive reading experience as I was writing it, and I have been rewarded by kind comments from readers to that exact effect, which truly warms my heart.
So, I thought it might be interesting to share with you a slightly more detailed version of the response I offer when asked about the origins of Sheriff Ty Dawson, and I hope it adds dimension and depth to the stories for you, and enriches the experience—as is my intention.
I like to say that I was born in South California (a term that is infrequently—if ever—used by anyone other than me, but I’ve always liked the look of those words on the page), birthed at the crossroads of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, reared in the shadow of Aquarius, and graduated from high school in the ballroom of the Hotel California.
I celebrated my 40th birthday while living in Kona, Hawaii, and after fifteen years in that island paradise, moved to the Willamette Valley, Oregon, where my wife and I reside today. But South California has remained as much a part of me as I of her, and not only because I still have family living there.
I was raised on a small ranch in San Juan Capistrano, a tiny (at the time) agricultural hamlet on the southern California coast, in many ways very much like the fictional town of Meridian, the epicenter of the Ty Dawson series, which began with the award-winning South California Purples. And, like my central character Ty Dawson, I grew up surrounded by horses, cattle, and untolled acres of farmland (orange groves, strawberries, avocados and cattle in my case), learning to saddle and handle a horse (a pony, at first) by the time I had reached my fourth birthday.
The timeline of the Ty Dawson series is set in the mid-1970s, although I chose that period for reasons most people may not be aware. I am the youngest of three children, with a brother and sister who are six- and four- years my senior, respectively. As the youngest among us, I had the distinct advantage of observing the experiences, glories and errors experienced by my siblings, and did my level best to steer clear of the growing list of things they did that drew the ire of my parents.
In 1973, the year in which the first of the Ty Dawson mysteries takes place, I was twelve years old. The very serious conversations that were taking place around our dinner table that year revolved around my brother having attained the age of registration for the military draft—the war in Vietnam continuing to rage unabated—augmented by stern warnings to my high-school-aged sister to avoid the manifold dangers of hallucinogenic drugs and, of course, boys. I listened with rapt interest and no small amount of trepidation, my pre-teen mind not always comprehending the complexities of the subject matter, nor the reasons my parents appeared so enormously apprehensive about the chaotic state of our world at that time, and the escalating social turmoil in our country. In retrospect, I suppose I believed that watching body-counts being tallied like box scores on the nightly network news was the norm.
Jump-cut to the year 2020, the year my family learned my father’s health had deteriorated both suddenly and considerably, and he had been given only a short time to live. Thankfully, my tribe had always been a close one, so we rallied around him in his final months, spending time together reminiscing and listening to his recollections of life growing up in Orange County, California. It was only then that I realized the breadth of all I hadn’t understood as a young boy listening in at that dinner table back in the tumultuous 1970s, more fully appreciating the concerns and fears that my parents had faced in raising teenagers amidst the Age of Aquarius, at the confluence of free-love, war and protest, and the social and political fallout that was to follow.
I began to see my father through a different lens, and as I did, Ty Dawson came fully to life in my imagination during those precious weeks. In 1973, he was a 40-year-old man who had seen battle in the Korean War; a man who had been raised with a set of expectations fostered by the Eisenhower era, staking a claim on an American Dream that was changing drastically and rapidly, right before his eyes. A man who witnessed his children coming to terms with wildly different challenges than he’d had to cope with in his youth. And as I sifted and explored the mindset from which Ty Dawson arose—myself having become a parent (and grandparent) now—Ty grew into a fully-fledged, three-dimensional character for me, as did Ty’s wife and daughter, and the friends and neighbors that have come to populate Dawson’s hometown, fictional Meriwether County. As a result, every moment I spend with Sheriff Ty Dawson as I write this series, I can hear the voice of my late father, who thankfully lived long enough to see the publication of South Calfornia Purples, and the dedication page in that volume which bears his name.
I spent those intervening years first as a working musician, record producer, and as an artist manager—advising, listening, traveling, laughing, negotiating and sometimes arguing with some of the most fascinating people in the world; my exposure to the music of my youth informing every mile and every moment. Perhaps one of my most cherished chapters from that period came from my association with legendary music- and film-producer, James William Guercio, founder of the famed Caribou Ranch Studios. Situated in the rural front range of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Caribou Ranch became the iconic recording resort home-away-from-home for artists as varied as Paul McCartney, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Chicago and John Lennon (among dozens of others). This association formed the backbone of a fictionalized narrative thread in Knife River, which to say much more about would spoil the fun…
My parents departed southern California for the Napa Valley almost 35 years ago now, though my two siblings remain, these days surrounded by the houses and highways that have replaced the vast acreage of orange trees, the golden blooms of wild mustard weed, and the lowing of cattle in the folds inside the foothills of my youth. But as many of us would likely agree, the place that dwells inside the root system of one’s childhood never departs—the landscape might look different, replaced or revised from that which resides inside our memories, but the heart still skips a beat when first returning ‘home’ after an absence.
You can learn more about Baron Birtcher by following him on Facebook and Instagram. Knife River is now available via all major booksellers.
